THE LIST Jan. 1- Dec. 31

* The music was widely considered to be the low point of the movie, but several of the songs used in the movie were referenced directly in the comic, apparently. 99 Luftballons was more relevant than people realize, because it's a song about nuclear war, which people don't always know.
* The love triangle is important in that it establishes why Dr. Manhattan leaves Earth.
* The Comedian's relationship with Silk Spectre is important because it leads us to why Dr. Manhattan re-affirms his relationship with humanity. The whole "oxygen into gold=miracle" spiel.
* The Comedian killing the hooker scene was important because it shows definitively the Comedian's perception of human nature, and more importantly, Dr. Manhattan's apathy toward it.
* The point of showing the Silk Spectre flashback twice was that she didn't remember the entire scenario the first time, as she'd blocked it out or not understood it as a child, and then finally seeing it again, she comes to the realization that the Comedian did her mom after all, and he was her real dad. Which in turn, leads Dr. Manhattan to understand that Laurie's existence was something of a miracle.
* The use of Nixon specifically is a reference to one of Moore's central themes, the use of agression vs. diplomacy. The entire story was meant as a commentary on the Reagan administration, but he used Nixon as a foil to that end, as to not be as blunt as to come out and say Reagan. In the comic book, it's mentioned that "R.R" was running for president, but we were supposed to assume Robert Redford (although, I think Robert Redford would've been quite a bit different in office than Reagan.) In the movie, they used Reagan directly as he's been gone a long time at this point.
* The sex scene is in the comic, but yea, perhaps it was drawn out a little much in the movie. Gotta give em boobies to keep em interested.
* Rorschach is killed in the comic the same way. It was pointed out that they turned his bloodstain into a rorschach blot for the movie, which may have been an improvement over the book, actually. But if he had lived and gone back to tell people what had happened, it kinda woulda screwed the end. It's supposed to be left rather open and ambiguous.

I had to do a lot of research to get all of that information, and I had a lot of free time to look that all up (I did all that a couple of weeks ago). But yea, if you delve deep enough, the story just blows me away. The movie was very, very true to the source material. Some temporal changes, and a few line changes, but mostly very, very close. Malin Akerman wasn't all that great, and I don't think she's even that hot, but SS in the book wasn't very interesting, either, to be honest. There's still another couple of hours worth of material that COULD'VE been included, but they trimmed it very effectively. Considering the difficulty in adapting something this deep, Snyder did an awesome job. If you didn't like it, that's cool, but trussme, there was a lot going on there, and almost everything that bothered you DID have a purpose for being in there.

See, I think that is why Watchmen didn't do that well at the box office, people just didn't know about the comic book, and thought whatever they saw on the screen was something some messed up screenwriter had thrown together while he was high. Warner Bros. should have really pushed the motion comic DVD as a must see in order to better understand the movie.